08-18-2015, 09:16 PM
(08-18-2015, 08:40 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: Like Greg Cook and David Pollack, we'll never know how great he could have been.
I doubt any teams took him off their board entirely. Perhaps some teams didn't plan to spend a 1st rounder on him, but I'm sure if he were available later, any team would've taken him at some point.
It was just assumed that he'd go in the top 3-5 picks.
1987: He missed his freshman year due to Osgood-Schlatter disease (inflammation associated with growth spurts).
1990: Knee and hand injuries limited him to just five games as a senior. But, he was a USA Today and Parade All-American after rushing for 985 yards and 11 touchdowns.
1991: He had arthroscopic surgery on a knee, causing him to redshirt.
1993: He suffered a calf strain against Illinois. Carter missed the last two regular season games before returning to rush 19 times for 93 yards and two touchdowns in the Florida Citrus Bowl.
1994: The calf strain was reported as a "knee injury" in by the start of the 1994 season, and that swelling in that knee forced him to miss spring practices. He also suffered a dislocated thumb, but that only caused him to miss two quarters.
Washington was picking fourth in 1995, one spot ahead of the Cincinnati Bengals, and its former general manager Charley Casserly recalls that he took Carter off the board due to their medical concerns.
"That was really our biggest thing on him," said Casserly, now an analyst on the NFL Network. "So at that point of the draft, we weren't going to consider him.
"He was a top 10 player but we had concerns on the medical and durability, but medical is an arbitrary decision. We took Curtis Martin off the board and obviously we weren't right on that one. It's a guessing game when you're doing medical. That's essential. If you only have half the story it's not fair to the Bengals."
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/sports/nfl/bengals/bengals-blog/2015/08/07/bengals-look-inside-kijana-carter-trade-red-flags/30854581/
